Writing a book on a topic is an art unto itself. Even most technical books have a coherent narrative, carefully crafted to bring the reader from point A to point B.
If you want a quick reference on a well-known topic, then sure, use an LLM. Or a search engine. Chances are it will even answer you correctly (but also chances are it won't, and if it is a new topic for yourself - strap in, you're in for a ride).
But if you want to really understand something, then you will have to do your research, and a lot of this research has already been summarized into tangible artifacts optimized for your consumption which LLMs would never be able to replicate.
Even if you can convince one to regurgitate a book verbatim, the narrative thread would be lost unless you weave it yourself with your prompts - but would you, the learner, be able to do re-enact the narrative better or even on the same level than the original author who posessed the knowledge on the topic?
> but would you, the learner, be able to do re-enact the narrative better or even on the same level than the original author who posessed the knowledge on the topic?
Maybe. The author needs to write in a way that makes the book digestible to most people. Prompts allow me to get a version that's tailor-made for me.
LLMs are making the quick jot to Stack Overflow obsolete, which solves your immediate problems using the least amount of brainpower.
They are also making reference-style documentation and long-form books more important than ever, since you still need to learn things and correct your own knowledge biases.
ChatGPT (3, I'm on the wait-list for 4) is fine at answering questions and coming up with code samples for stuff that's on the beaten path (hey, how do I do this in python or go). I don't have many of these sorts of questions.
I've found it to be wholly inadequate at answering the kinds of questions I do have a lot of - stuff like "How to watch a list of objects using kubernetes controller-runtime?". The answer I got is entirely hallucinated.
For those I find myself still searching GitHub for example code and sometimes using stack overflow.
"Most people" do a lot of stupid stuff, I don't really care what everyone else does. Because the majority of people do something is absolutely no justification.
At one point in time, > 50% of people used to smoke cigarettes too.
If you want a quick reference on a well-known topic, then sure, use an LLM. Or a search engine. Chances are it will even answer you correctly (but also chances are it won't, and if it is a new topic for yourself - strap in, you're in for a ride).
But if you want to really understand something, then you will have to do your research, and a lot of this research has already been summarized into tangible artifacts optimized for your consumption which LLMs would never be able to replicate.
Even if you can convince one to regurgitate a book verbatim, the narrative thread would be lost unless you weave it yourself with your prompts - but would you, the learner, be able to do re-enact the narrative better or even on the same level than the original author who posessed the knowledge on the topic?